Shift Seen Atop Millennium Pharmaceuticals
By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: June 29, 2005
Mark J. Levin, who has led Millennium Pharmaceuticals since its inception 12 years ago, is stepping down as chief executive, the company is expected to announce today. He will be succeeded by Deborah Dunsire, who has been running Novartis's cancer drug business in North America.
The transition comes as Millennium, based in Cambridge, Mass., has turned to developing drugs rather than searching for genes. It is striving to become profitable next year, but some analysts say sales of the company's two drugs are not growing fast enough to allow that.
Mr. Levin, who was a venture capitalist before helping to found Millennium, said yesterday in an interview that the change was partly motivated by his desire to do something different and by the belief that the company needs a leader with more experience in selling drugs.
"We started a search a few years ago and it was intensified over the last couple of years," said Mr. Levin, 54, who added that he would spend time with his family before deciding what to do next. He will remain a director but will cede the chairman's title to another director, Kenneth Weg, a former executive at Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Millennium was one of the first companies to focus on systematically searching for genes linked to disease. Some large pharmaceutical companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars to tap into Millennium's expertise in the belief that genomics would revolutionize drug discovery.
But Mr. Levin conceded that none of the drugs that Millennium was selling or was testing in clinical trials resulted from its gene-hunting activities, with one partial exception.
Instead, Millennium used some of the billions of dollars it raised from partners and investors to buy companies with products. It has two drugs on the market, Integrilin, for acute coronary syndrome, and Velcade, for multiple myeloma. Revenues from drug sales and alliances were $448 million last year but the company still lost $252 million.
Mr. Levin has outlasted the original chief executives of many other early genomics companies like Human Genome Sciences, Celera Genomics and Incyte. Those companies are also now becoming drug companies but, unlike Millennium, none has a drug on the market.
A former Millennium director, Vaughn M. Kailian, said, "Mark used his capital to help transform the company at a time when he could and now it's a commercial enterprise."
Dr. Dunsire, 43, a native of South Africa, was a general practitioner before joining Sandoz, which later became Novartis, in 1988. After helping oversee clinical trials in South Africa, she moved to headquarters in Switzerland in 1991, then to the United States in 1994.
Novartis's North American cancer business has about $2 billion in annual sales and 700 people, mostly salesmen, she said.
The highlight of her tenure was the introduction of Gleevec, which has been highly effective against chronic myeloid leukemia.
Dr. Dunsire said a priority at Millennium would be to strengthen the sales and marketing organization. She said she would maintain the goal of becoming profitable next year.
In taking the job, Dr. Dunsire will become one of the most prominent women in the biotechnology industry.
nytimes.com |
